Amanda Marcotte takes down Sunshine Mary; Mary digs her hole deeper

Why should women want the attention of men who see them as nothing more than unpaid servants and semen toilets? …

The alternative to having a hateful misogynist around who expects you to clean up after him, accept his ranting about how women are a repulsive subhuman class whose only purpose is service to men, and to masturbate him without any hope of sexual pleasure yourself is simple: Not being with such a man. As many feminists can tell you, there’s a really pleasant alternative: Men who like women and like to hang out with us and aren’t just tolerating us in exchange for sex and housework.

But what if, as manosphere men (and antifeminist women like Sunshine Mary) like to gloat, you can’t find a man?

Being alone is better than being with a man who thinks you’re part of a degraded class put here to serve him. No matter how much misogynists may rant, they can’t get around this inherent problem in their philosophy, which is that “alone” is always a superior alternative to their company.

Sunshine Mary has responded with a post that basically argues, well, but men don’t like you, you fat slutty feminists — take that!

One of the core pillars of feminism seems to be trying to control how men think about women. We want to be seen as smart, so by fiat order we’ll command men to see us as equally intelligent. We want to be seen as having the ability to be sexually promiscuous, so we’ll command men to hold a positive opinion of sluttery. We want to be seen as beautiful at 200 pounds, so we’ll command men to find us hot despite our obesity.

But it doesn’t work. Men don’t like slutty women for anything other than sex, as the last comment thread here rather conclusively proved. Men don’t find fat women attractive. Men don’t like bitchy, loud-mouthed mannish feminists. Men don’t care about women’s supposed careers. All the commands in the world will only cause men to keep their opinions quiet, but it does not change those opinions. All the attempts in the world at resocializing men to like what feminism has turned women into will always fail because it works against the natural order of things.

Now this is just nonsensical and, you know, not true for all but a backwards and rather assholish subset of men. But it’s what follows that’s really chilling — not chilling because it reflects reality, but chilling because it suggests how punitive and self-hating Sunshine Mary’s philosophy really is.

She argues that feminists find the Manosphere “scary” because manosphere misogynists won’t do what feminists want them to do.

It is scary to imagine that men will stop doing what they are told by women to do. It is scary to feminists in particular because, instead of being dependent on one man like I am, they are dependent on men as a group to fund them.

Men pay the majority of taxes in the United States. Without men’s taxes, student financial aid for Women’s Studies degrees will dry up. Without men’s taxes, baby mamas will starve. Without men financing it, women who are being placed into corporate leadership simply as a response to affirmative action and who then quit these jobs after a year to write tear-filled articles in the Atlantic about work-life balance, demanding even more subsidies from men to ensure that women never need to suffer the consequences for their stupid choices, will cease. I only have to manage my husband’s opinion of me in order to secure his provisioning; feminists have to control all men’s opinions of them in order to secure their provisioning.

Yep, that’s right. Sunshine Mary believes that women are incapable of taking care of themselves and so must depend, essentially, on appeasing men in order to survive. She thinks she’s lucky because she only has to appease one man, while women who actually, you know, earn a living have to appease all men. Because they’re not really earning a living. They’re just playing at earning a living because the men of the world are nice enough to humor them.

But don’t make the men mad, Sunshine Mary warns, because then you’re screwed!

And she seems rather pleased that she can make this threat from what she percieves as her position of relative security.

Oh! Sunshine’s yakking about push presents and elaborate marriage proposals today. (She appears to think both are new rituals.)

Thank heavens that if people are going to do things Sunshine herself did and approves of, such as marry and have babies, at least they still sometimes do them in ways that allow Sunshine to continue feeling exceptionally holy. 😀

That’s a truthism based on a misunderstanding of how animals behave. You know bird females who choose a partner for life? Turns out most eggs end up being from males other than their partner. Not that any of that is relevant to humans, mind you.

It’s not so much the idea of giving a gift that confused me as the terminology. Although I always figured that if you were going to give someone who’d just had a baby a gift it would probably be a gift for the baby (preferably a practical one, like clothes or other useful baby stuff). If it’s functioning like giving the dog a treat for learning to sit on command then that’s pretty sad.

I am right now casting about on the internets for a baby gift for my friend who just had a little boy. (Or rather, she had him a while ago, but he’s only recently home from the hospital because he was a preemie.)

eh, people who get into the push present thing usually have more than enough cash for baby-clothes and so forth. It’s not like people with that kind of money aren’t going to spend a fair amount of it on frivolous stuff anyway; a nice gift for the new mom in conjunction with childbirth seems as good an excuse as any to me.

I think it’s a really tacky term to describe something that could actually be a nice idea.

but that COULD just be sour grapes– my family does well just to keep the normal bills paid and I am quite unlikely ever to own a designer purse, so…. 😀

@Cloudiah my favorite gift for new parents is diapers, or a card to Babies’R’Us. My extended family and friends sent SO much clothing and toys and blankets that I am pretty sure we didn’t manage to use half of it. It just wasn’t possible.

But diapers; that’s probably 18 months of poopy diapers, minimum… you can never have too many diapers!

I quite like the idea of giving someone who’s just had a baby something for herself, I’d just rather it not be accompanied with a sentiment that sounds like it’s basically analogous to “good dog”. Spa certificates sound like a nice idea, or some other similarly pampering-oriented gift.

I’m on board with the “you just pushed a kid out? Here’s your all expenses paid pass for a full day of pampering sans baby to help you feel better” though the moms I know who’ve gotten one would almost universally have preferred someone to do the laundry.

When one of my friends gave birth, I gave her a booklet of coupons for me to come over and watch the kid whenever she needed a nap or a long bath or a block of time otherwise spent not dealing with anything to do with the baby. Because she’s my friend and I love her, I’m also happy to strap the baby on (I kinda love those snuggly harness things) and do dishes, laundry and the like while I’m there. For everything but vacuuming, Norah seems to just settle in and snooze.

Her husband gave her a bracelet that she never gets to wear because she’s afraid the baby will barf on it (in fairness, pretty much every thing in the house has been barfed on recently; they’re still passing through the projectile vomiting phase of babyrearing).

I don’t know anyone who’s had a baby recently, but it occurs to me that offering to cook for a new parent might be helpful. I’ve done that in the past for a friend who had a very energetic kid who loved to get underfoot while she was in the kitchen – made a big pot of stew and filled up the freezer.

She is actually getting a new (used) car, though, because her old car could only handle one kid. Her husband’s car can take them both, but they both need to be able to do school/childcare pickups. I got her daughter a very soft blanket (kid-sized, not baby-sized) when she was born, and they still use it so I might do the same for the boy.

My presence is gold for my friends: for some reason Norah just settles down and gurgles at me (they are new parents and on the nervous side, whereas I was changing diapers when I was 12 and so being smeared with odd substances from tiny humans is no big deal for me, and I always have ear plugs so that I can cuddle a screaming baby without having to bear the full brunt of the sound explosion)

The teeny ones really respond to confidence and experience, don’t they? My cousin’s kid (who is now two and a half and one of my BFFs) always relaxed when my mother picked him up, especially when he was brand new.

I’ve heard of push presents, but when I was younger my mom read trashy magazines and a lot of hollywood celebs do them.

Babies are great. Sometimes too much and I’m glad I have the option to give them back to their parents, but they’re warm fuzzy little furnaces. Also, babies have more confidence and are more adventurous and outgoing when they’re picked up every time they cry, instead of being allowed to cry themselves to sleep. Current theory is that they understand that when they need their parents, their parents are always there, so they feel more encouraged to take risks and be out in the world knowing that they have people to support them when they need them. It’s kinda cool, and completely counter to that “They’ll be more self-sufficient if you let them deal by themselves!” idea.

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